1.
Cold,
dishwater wind. The snow is not alive,
but
sleeps. A blade of grass.
Happy
birthday. You claimed to be
the
least difficult of men. The shadows of culture, sex,
and
the Museum of Modern Art.
How
different might be the movie version of your life
against
the video game. Or Frank O’Hara On Ice,
sweeping
Toller Cranston loops of Lady, Lady.
There
were years I thought “On Ice”
the
logical endpoint
to
Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo:
poetry book,
novel,
film adaptation, graphic novel adaptation,
stage
production, unwatched sequel,
a
screenwriter’s diary of the original. Now I realize
that
nothing ends, or dies: it all
returns.
2.
Beaudelaire’s casual observance. I did this,
and
this
and
that. One walks: I hardly ever think of March 27, 1926,
or
most dates, really. A hierarchy
of
moments, pinpoints, recollections. The question
of
whether we are writing poems
as
a sequence of promissory notes: to time, the living and
the
endless dead; to echoes, reached out and dismantled, across
a
wide variety of interactions.
I
miss you, David W. McFadden. Ken Norris, retired,
has
woken from a lengthy silence. Meredith Quartermain
walks
the western rail and fault, line
after
seacoast line.
There
is a twitter account I follow, self-christened
Is Today Ted Danson’s
Birthday? Daily tweets,
informing all
who
wish to know. Most days are not,
but
by December 29:
Cheers.
3.
In
the absence of matter, a baseline
curvature.
I can say anything. A heartvein, throbs
beneath
the skin of every sidewalk,
lyric,
casemate. You hear the sun. Francis Russell
“Frank”
O’Hara: one hundred years,
give
or take,
since
you arrived. We calculate direction, skin,
soft
tissue. The least difficult of men: a claim
I
also make, but reaps
such
skepticism. Scrutiny, I ask,
can
any poem stand? Who said a work of art
is
not a living thing? The triple axel,
spun
in furor, sleek
and
nigh impossible. Joe Dick throws the mic stand
down
the ice, flips tavern tables. All I want, he wrote,
is
a subway handy. All I want
is
boundless love.
4.
If
your eyes were vague blue, mine might be
a
smoky grey. Dead poets walking. A germ theory
of
contagion. It doesn’t matter
when
your birthday was. Although I
track
mine with an attention
bordering
on fervor. The whole of your life,
unaware
your parents displaced your delivery
three
full months, reassigned to cover up
a
pre-wedding conception: a stigma scandalous
to
their Irish-Catholic fetters. And so,
they
lied. Does this gift you neither birthday, faux-Cancer,
displaced
Aries? Or two? As Artie Gold wrote, O’Hara
died like Christ, and baby Jesus, too,
a birthday
fluid
at the edge of orthodoxies. I step outside,
I
make a shape inside the figure
of
a word. Is this for real?
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